s, and their voices are no
less agreeable and effective. They represent gentlemen, and they
produce the illusion. In this endeavor they deserve even greater credit
than the actresses, for in modern comedy, of which the repertory of the
Theatre Francais is largely composed, they have nothing in the way of
costume to help to carry it off. Half a dozen ugly men, in the periodic
coat and trousers and stove-pipe hat, with blue chins and false
moustaches, strutting before the footlights, and pretending to be
interesting, romantic, pathetic, heroic, certainly play a perilous
game. At every turn they suggest prosaic things, and their liabilities
to awkwardness are increased a thousand fold. But the comedians of the
Theatre Francais are never awkward, and when it is necessary they solve
triumphantly the problem of being at once realistic to the eye and
romantic to the imagination.

I am speaking always of one's first impression of them. There are spots
on the sun, and you discover after a while that there are little
irregularities at the Theatre Francais. But the acting is so
incomparably better than any that you have seen, that criticism for a
long time is content to lie dormant. I shall never forget how at first
I was under the charm. I liked the very incommodities of the place; I
am not sure that I did not find a certain mystic salubrity in the bad
ventilation. The Theatre Francais, it is known, gives you a good deal
for your money. The performance, which rarely ends before midnight, and
sometimes transgresses it, frequently begins by seven o'clock. The
first hour or two is occupied by secondary performers; but not for the
world at this time would I have missed the first rising of the curtain.
No dinner could be too hastily swallowed to enable me to see, for
instance, Mme. Nathalie in Octave Feuillet's charming little comedy of
"Le Village." Mme. Nathalie was a plain, stout old woman, who did the
mothers, and aunts, and elderly wives; I use the past tense because she
retired from the stage a year ago, leaving a most conspicuous vacancy.
She was an admirable actress, and a perfect mistress of laughter and
tears. In "Le Village" she played an old provincial _bourgeoise_ whose
husband takes it into his head, one winter night, to start on the tour
of Europe with a roving bachelor friend, who has dropped down on him at
supper-time, after the lapse of years, and has gossiped him into
momentary discontent with his fireside existence